For the past several years, across a number of essays and talks, I have been kicking around the concept of the “Ludic Century” – the idea that we are living in an era of history that has a special relationship to games.

Kotaku.com has just published my Manifesto for a Ludic Century – a short essay that articulates that notion, along with a discussion of systems, play, design, and why in the future everyone will be a game designer. Heather Chaplin, who has been an important sounding-board for these ideas, has written a wonderfully critical response that appears just after the manifesto itself.

Big thanks to Kirk Hamilton and Stephen Totillo at Kotaku for making this happen! The Manifesto will also appear next year in The Gameful World, a book of essays edited by Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding.